Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef

Chapter 1. Infrastructure As Code

	“When deploying and administering large infrastructures, it is still common to think in terms of individual machines rather than view an entire infrastructure as a combined whole. This standard practice creates many problems, including labor-intensive administration, high cost of ownership, and limited generally available knowledge or code usable for administering large infrastructures.”
	--Steve Traugott and Joel Huddleston, TerraLuna LLC

	“In today’s computer industry, we still typically install and maintain computers the way the automotive industry built cars in the early 1900s. An individual craftsman manually manipulates a machine into being, and manually maintains it afterwards. The automotive industry discovered first mass production, then mass customisation using standard tooling. The systems administration industry has a long way to go, but is getting there.”
	--Steve Traugott and Joel Huddleston, TerraLuna LLC

These two statements came from the prophetic infrastructures.org website at the very start of the last decade. Nearly ten years later, a whole world of exciting developments have taken place, which have sparked a revolution, and given birth to a radical new approach to the process of designing, building and maintaining the underlying IT systems that make web operations possible. At the heart of that revolution is a mentality and a tool set that treats Infrastructure as Code.

This book is written from the standpoint that this approach ...